


No Song Unsung, No Wine Untasted

by Lauralot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Cocaine, Cooking, Drug Use, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Brainwashing, Past Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 05:52:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3279161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve had expected Bucky would have strong feelings toward the Russians who held him captive.  He hadn't expected them to be feelings of camaraderie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Song Unsung, No Wine Untasted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Andartha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andartha/gifts).



> This is technically a sequel to a previous story, _[Made and Used and Wasted.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2705774)_ However, you need not have read the first story to understand this one; the only reoccurring thing is a character named Isayev, who was one of the Winter Soldier's handlers in the USSR. It is also not a proper sequel, as the events of the first story (ending before Captain America: The Winter Soldier began) would have pushed it into alternate universe territory, but this story is directly following the established movie plotline.
> 
> Much of the plot for this story was inspired by [comments](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/19368587) from [Andartha](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Andartha/pseuds/Andartha) on _Made and Used and Wasted._
> 
> Translations for the Russian should appear if you hover over the text. I have also included the translations in the ending author's note.

Steve’s first thought was _I’ve lost my security deposit._

Actually, he lost that months ago, when Bucky fired through his wall and spilled Fury’s blood over the hardwood. That was before Steve had known it was Bucky, before he’d discovered HYDRA coiled and constricting in every nook and cranny of SHIELD. Before Bucky had come back to Steve, silent and sullen but _alive._

It was hard to think back to that time now, when Steve walked in to find the apartment in shambles. The bookcase was upended, its previous contents sprawled across his rug. The couch cushions were also strewn around the room, gouged open as though they’ve been used to block knives. Something—or someone—had been thrown into the record player, all but breaking the device in half.

Steve’s second and far more pressing thought was simply _Bucky._

It had only been two hours since Steve left the apartment. It was the first time he’d left Bucky without Sam or Natasha to look after him. Bucky had been doing so much better, calmer, no longer standing at parade rest until he was ordered to sit or tearing apart his bedroom in search of bugs.

“Buck?” Steve asked the empty air.

This didn’t look like a fit of paranoia. Bucky was much more methodical in his searches for tracking devices, much more subtle. Either this was an attack or Bucky had one hell of a violent nightmare. Either option turned Steve’s stomach; if Bucky did this in a fit of terror, he might have felt compelled to punish himself for the damages. “Bucky?”

He heard Bucky’s voice then: not from within the apartment, but the hall outside.

“ _Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka moya_!”

There was another voice, another set of footsteps, accompanying Bucky. Neither was steady on their feet.

And they were singing.

Steve stepped back just as the door flew open.

Bucky was grinning, half-hanging off of a middle-aged man with a crooked and bruised nose. There were smudges of dried blood around the man’s nostrils, suggesting his nose was recently broken. He had lightly feathered hair that was graying at the temples, and a shopping bag in either hand. Bucky had a bag in his right hand. His left, slung over the man’s shoulder, held a bottle of vodka that was all but empty.

There were more vodka bottles poking out of one of the stranger’s bags.

“ _V sadu yagoda malinka—_ ”

The singing stopped when their eyes fell on Steve, but before he could ask any questions, Bucky began chattering excitedly. “Steve! _Privet_ , Steve! _Eta Komandir_ Isayev! _My_ —”

“ _Angliyski, dorogoy_ ,” said the stranger, kicking off his shoes.

Bucky laughed, doing the same. His eyes were red-rimmed. “Steve! This is Commander Isayev, from Russia!”

“I know,” Steve said slowly. He was far from fluent, but he’d picked up on that much. There were a thousand questions in his mind. _What happened to the apartment?_ seemed self-explanatory now, but that didn’t explain why Bucky went _shopping_ with one of the men who helped torture and brainwash him. Or got drunk. Or broke into song. Steve settled on “What is he doing here?” as Bucky, giggling again, pushed Isayev into the apartment.

“Cooking,” said the Russian. He untangled himself from under Bucky’s arm and tried pulling the vodka bottle from the metal hand. “Let go, dearest, you hold too tightly when you’re drunk.”

“It won’t cut me,” Bucky protested, sniffing, but he let it slip into Isayev’s grip. The Russian drank the last of its contents before setting the bottle on the floor.

“Cooking?” was all Steve could manage.

“American food tastes of metal and grease,” Bucky said. He was still smiling. This was the first time Steve had seen him smile since 1944.

“Get the beef boiling, darling,” Isayev instructed, pulling another bottle from the bags. “That will take the longest.” His eyes fell on Steve. “I must trouble you for a glass.”

Steve opened his mouth to answer, then shut it again. “Bucky.”

“ _Da_?” Bucky asked, rummaging through the cabinets.

He forced his breathing to steady before he spoke again. “Can you please explain why you’re cooking with your former handler? And why he’s here at all? And _what happened to my house_?”

“Oh,” Bucky said, attempting to place a stew pot in the sink and missing entirely. “Ah. We have formed an alliance.”

“An alliance?”

Isayev navigated around Steve and into the kitchen. “Only a temporary armistice, of course.” Pausing before the stovetop, he leaned down to examine the burners, then straightened back up, smiling. “You didn’t tell me it was a gas stove.”

“Is that good?” Bucky asked, wiping at his nose. “The base where I learned to cook—that was a wood stove.” He managed to situate the pot below the faucet, flipping the water on. “There was no running water there. They’d send me to fill buckets with snow.” He sniffed again.

“It’s very good,” Isayev said, and now he was the one rooting through Steve’s kitchen.

That at least got Steve angry enough to break out of his stunned silence. “ _Bucky._ What sort of alliance?”

“Oh,” Bucky said, remembering to shut off the water just before the pot could overflow. He spilled a little back out, giggling. His face was flushed. Steve hadn’t realized he could get drunk. “ _My reshíli_ —” And then he was off, speaking a mile a minute, too quickly for Steve to register any words to translate.

“English, dearest,” Isayev chided. He was pouring a glass of vodka.

“— _zatem_ —Isayev is from Department X, where I lived before the Russians traded me to HYDRA,” Bucky said, flipping between the languages instantaneously. He set the pot on the stove before digging into the shopping bags. His hands remerged with a bundle wrapped in butcher’s paper, and Bucky began to peel the wrapping away. “When HYDRA’s secrets were placed online, so were some of the Department’s. They traded in information as well as assets.”

“Incompetents.” Isayev said it through clenched teeth as Bucky dropped a beef shank into the water.

“Isayev was sent into the country for retribution,” Bucky continued. “Then he decided things would be better for the Department if he retrieved me. So he thought he would infiltrate the apartment to take me back, but I broke his nose.”

“For the second time!” Grinning, Isayev raised his glass.

“Twice?” Bucky asked as Steve tried to keep from gaping.

“Remember the Kholodov mission, darling?” Off of Bucky’s blank stare, Isayev shrugged. “No matter, it will return to you.”

Bucky sniffed. “And so we formed the alliance. We hate HYDRA more than we hate each other, so we hunt down the parts of HYDRA that haven’t yet burned, and we make them bleed. Once that is done, Isayev will try to take me away and I’ll snap his neck.”

“Don’t be so confident.” The man ruffled Bucky’s hair and Bucky only giggled, leaning toward the touch. “It’s unbecoming.”

Steve blinked, shifted his weight, as though he could walk away from this. Before him, Isayev was offering the vodka to Bucky, and Steve tried not to watch. “Bucky, if you wanted to fight HYDRA—you—I can help.” Of course Bucky would want retribution, but he’d never _said_. This was the most Steve had heard him speak since the war. All this time, Steve had been letting him brood in his bedroom. Was all he needed to come back to himself a battle worth fighting? “SHIELD’s back—”

And Bucky knocked the vodka glass away from his mouth in order to spit on the floor. “What’s so good about SHIELD? Your government has the same diseases as the other _parazity_ it lay beside, I think. The missions I was sent on benefited Pierce’s SHIELD as much as Pierce’s HYDRA. He was a bad leader—he emptied out my mind and then got angry when I tried to fill it. And your people loved him.”

 _They’re your people too._ Steve bit his tongue to hold it in.

“I’m not going back to another chair,” Bucky declared, switching on the burner.

“Unless it’s in the Motherland!” Isayev said.

And then they resumed singing in Russian before Steve could point out that Department X benefited from HYDRA even more than SHIELD had. “ _Akh, pod sosnoyu, pod zelenoyu, spat' polozhite vy menya..._ ”

There was a knock on the door before Steve could begin tearing his hair out. He tensed; Bucky responded to unexpected visitors with knives and projectiles most of the time. But Bucky, with the vodka back at his lips, didn’t even twitch.

“Hey,” Sam said as Steve opens the door. “Sorry to drop by unannounced, but I think I left my phone here after the run this morn—”

He fell silent as his eyes scanned the apartment. In the kitchen, Isayev had one hand holding the glass to Bucky’s mouth, and the other stroking his hair. He was still singing. “— _dusha-dyevitsa, polyubi zhe ty myenya_ —”

“Maybe I should come back,” Sam said.

“No!” Steve grabbed his wrist, pulling him in. “No. You stay.”

*

“I thought super soldiers couldn’t get drunk?” Sam asked.

After Bucky had put his hand through a cabinet without even realizing it, the four of them had scooped up what remained of the cushions in the living room and placed them back onto the furniture, deciding it best to sit as the meat stewed. Bucky was half-lying on Isayev, still giggling to himself, as Isayev sipped the vodka and Steve pretended he didn’t feel the urge to snap the Russian’s neck himself.

“Not without a lot of effort and expense,” Steve managed. “But then, Bucky had the knockoff serum.”

“Which Russia had no hand in,” Isayev was quick to mention, gesturing so abruptly he nearly spilled alcohol onto the rug. “Blame the Swiss for that. We’re the ones who gave him purpose and values. We built the world’s greatest soldier from that shivering wreckage.” His smile at Bucky, who had his head resting on Isayev’s shoulder, was beatific.

It took all Steve had not to vomit. “By burning all the memories out of his head?”

“A few only,” Bucky protested, and both the sentiment and the phrasing made Steve’s teeth grind. Nothing Bucky had said tonight sounded like _Bucky_ , the way he’d used to form sentences. It sounded like a foreigner translating in his mind before he spoke. Granted, Bucky had communicated in mostly Russian for decades, but in the little he’d spoken before today, in the time since he came back to Steve, he’d sounded like his old self.

Bucky was code-switching. That wouldn’t sting so much if Steve didn’t have the nagging suspicion that the Brooklyn dialect was the front.

“Almost thirty years of your life, Buck,” Steve said. “That’s not a few memories.”

“The Director said most of that was gone when we found him.” Isayev set his glass carefully on the splintered, wobbling coffee table. “She would have said you were fated to us, dearest, if she believed in such superstition. And beyond that, such memories of your capitalist society—to have all those bourgeois notions filling up your head would only hurt you.”

“Yeah,” Steve snapped. “Real compassionate of you to wipe that away.”

“HYDRA, they took everything.” Bucky raised his head, wiping at his nose again. “They didn’t want a soldier the way the Department had. They only wanted a gun.”

“Fools.” Isayev bared his teeth as he spoke, though his hand was gentle as it carded through Bucky’s hair. “Such incompetence, such waste. Their Insight would have succeeded had they not rinsed the _partiinost_ from your mind.”

“ _Partiinost_?” Sam asked. 

“Party-mindedness,” Steve supplied. In his pocket, his phone vibrated, but he didn’t trust himself not to crush it if he took it out now. “Devotion to the Soviet Union.”

“Yes,” said Isayev. “Precisely.” He held his hand as though it were a gun, angled directly between Steve’s eyes. “Had he been _ours_ , he would never have abandoned all he knew for an individual. He would not have hesitated. Such bad maintenance—no wonder HYDRA failed.”

“But the _point,_ ” Sam said quickly, putting his hand on Steve’s knee before Steve could get up to rip out the Russian’s spine, “is that Bucky can get drunk, right?”

“Oh, he can,” Isayev said placidly, lowering his hand. “When he was our good soldier, we used to reward him with our best spirits. This?” He tapped the rim of the glass. “This is water for him. It’s mostly the cocaine affecting him now.”

“The _what,_ ” Steve said.

“Once we agreed to the armistice,” Isayev explained, “he said he missed the snow in Russia, didn’t you, darling? Well, I could not bring that to him—but he liked the drug as well, and it’s nearly the same thing.”

And Bucky began to giggle so hard he couldn’t support himself. “There’s still a bit left,” he said, groping for Isayev’s pocket and only succeeding in tugging on the man’s belt. “It’s nice, Steve. You might even smile for once.”

Steve shot up only to find Sam suddenly before him, blocking the path to Isayev. “So,” Sam said loudly, glancing toward the kitchen. “Making soup, huh? What’s going in besides beef?”

“Beetroot,” Isayev said, glancing at his watch. “But that isn’t added for nearly an hour.”

“Borscht?” Sam asked.

“ _Borsch,_ ” Bucky and Isayev shouted simultaneously.

To Sam’s credit, the yelling super soldier didn’t make him jump. Then again, he had a good month of Bucky-sitting under his belt already.

“The ‘t’ is not said,” Isayev continued.

“Right.” Sam nudged Steve back toward his chair before turning his attention to the vodka on the table. “Mind if I pour a glass?”

“We’ve no shortage.”

Steve’s phone buzzed again. With a slow breath, he took it from his pocket. Two texts, each from Natasha. The first read _Found you a date. :) I’ll watch James free of charge – you need a break._ The second: _You could at least say no – what if I have some poor girl waiting for you?_

 _One of Bucky’s former comrades is getting high on my couch,_ Steve texted back. _Now is not the time._

The message barely had time to deliver before Natasha responded. _Who?_

 _Esive,_ Steve typed, but that couldn’t possibly be the correct spelling. _Isiev._ No. _Isyev_. Close enough.

Ten long seconds ticked by before Natasha responded. _On my way. Don’t die._

Five minutes later, and the Russian drinking song that Bucky and Isayev were teaching Sam was interrupted by Natasha kicking open the door, guns blazing.

*

There were now six bullet holes decorating the living room wall. Sam had to go door to door and persuade the neighbors not to call the cops, using some excuse about a very powerful surround sound system.

One of the shots had grazed Isayev’s throat. Bucky had put a stop to things by tackling Natasha, refusing to release her until the guns were disposed of.

“That was perhaps a centimeter from the carotid,” Isayev said, grinning, pressing a hand to his throat. There was blood on Steve’s hardwood again. “That’s the Natalia I remember.”

“What I’d give to forget you,” she spat.

“My dove, you don’t mean that—” Isayev began, and had Bucky not dragged him to the bathroom to bandage the injury, Steve was sure Natasha would have gouged his eyes out with her hands.

Steve couldn’t say for certain that he would have tried to stop her.

When they returned from the bathroom, ten minutes later, Bucky’s eyes were bloodshot and his nose bleeding. The bandaging on Isayev’s throat looked haphazard and Steve wished him an infection.

“Natalia, my flower,” Isayev said. He didn’t speak until he’d maneuvered a giggling Bucky to stand between them, the bastard. “It’s understandable to kill me, but let us be civilized about these things. It can wait until after dinner—we aren’t animals.”

“Until after we’ve slaughtered HYDRA!” Bucky added, dragging Isayev by the hand into the kitchen.

“That depends entirely on the dinner,” Natasha said. Her face was unreadable. “Did you even get black bread?”

“You wound me.” Isayev pulled a rye loaf from one of the shopping bags. “I sampled it myself. Do you think so little of me? Do you think I’m not a proper gentleman?”

“I know you’re not a proper gentleman,” she said, shoving roughly past him. “And I’m not letting you ruin the blini this time. I’ll handle this.”

And that was how Steve ended up with two Russians, his confused and drugged best friend, and his entirely too calm running buddy making borscht and pancakes in his kitchen.

Steve couldn’t say how it happened. He stopped perceiving the world around him for a while after Bucky asked if he’d like to dice the potatoes, drifting in anger and bewilderment, and he didn’t come back to himself until his vision went red. For a second, Steve assumed it was anger. Then he realized he was staring down at the counter where Bucky was peeling beets. Beets that were staining Steve’s cutting board a deep, vivid pink.

“You have no caviar,” Natasha said, adding salt and sugar to a bowl. “And you call yourself proper.”

“Tell me where I might find decent caviar in such a city as this, my dove, and I shall go at once.” Isayev had pulled the meat from the water and was slicing it to pieces. “Anyway, we picked a very nice jam.”

“That isn’t the same,” she said.

“I like the jam.” Bucky was grating the beets now, using his metal hand to scrape one along the mandolin. “There was no caviar at my first base. There was little jam either. Mostly I had porridge and soup. _Shchi da kasha – pishcha nasha_ , that was what they would say.”

“ _Shchi da kasha – pishcha nasha,_ ” Natasha and Isayev echoed.

“And only half-rations if I misbehaved.” The metal of Bucky’s hand shrieked against the mandolin. He lifted it and picked up a second beet to repeat the process. “I misbehaved very much at the beginning, I think. But after my first mission, when I had been good, they let me have blini with jam. It was so nice that I cried.”

Steve did not cry. He focused on dicing the potatoes into increasingly smaller cubes. Focused on breathing.

“I always thought borscht was vegetarian,” Sam said. Steve could feel Sam’s eyes on him, but he didn’t risk raising his head. He didn’t trust himself not to visibly react in a way that would scare Bucky off of speaking up again. “Come to think of it, I always thought it was nothing but beets.”

“It’s very much more than beetroot,” Isayev said. “The beef is one of the most important parts.”

“We had no beef at the first base,” Bucky mused. He was grating a carrot now. “They told me to put lentils in the borscht. For the protein.”

“Dearest.” Isayev dumped the meat back into the water before he reached out to stroke Bucky’s hair. “You’ve suffered more than any man should bear.”

“It doesn’t sound like your memories from that base are very nice, Bucky,” Steve said. He didn’t trust himself to say anything more.

“The commander would sing to me at night sometimes,” Bucky said. He wiped at his nose with his shirt cuff. “I couldn’t sleep so well, so he would sing.”

“What did he sing?” Natasha asked.

Bucky stepped back from the counter, cleared his throat. “ _Sim uznayesh budit vremya branoye zhityo, smyelo vdyenish nogu f stremya i vazmyosh ruzhyo._ ”

“Ah,” said Isayev, offering Bucky a handkerchief. “ _Bayushki bayu_ , the Cossack lullaby.”

“I’m surprised he sang you that one,” Natasha said. “The Bolsheviks weren’t so fond of the Cossacks.”

“ _Ya ne ponimayu,_ ” said Steve, stilling his knife. “ _Govorite pozhaluysta medlenneye_? ”

All eyes in the room turned toward him.

Natasha was the first to speak. “Your accent is atrocious.”

“It is not so bad,” Isayev said. His hand moved as if to brush Steve’s shoulder, but Steve shifted out of reach. “He hasn’t spoken it so long, eh? Not all Americans can sound like our Soldier. And you speak it too well when you’re sober, dearest,” he added, glancing to Bucky. “It makes you sound foreign, it’s so perfect.”

“Commander Karpov taught me Russian a second time when he met me.” Bucky was smiling. For the first time since the forties, that smile was directed at Steve. “He said I hadn’t learned it properly and my accent was like a _gopnik._ ” Wiping at his face with the handkerchief, he nodded to Steve and began to sing again, slower. “ _Sim uznayesh budit vremya branoye zhityo, smyelo vdyenish nogu f stremya i vazmyosh ruzhyo._ ”

Steve caught “soldier” and “gun” and little else.

Things became a bit of a blur after that. There was more singing and speaking—mostly in Russian—more debates over proper cuisine, and much more vodka. Isayev kept setting the empty bottles on the floor, even though he and Bucky were in their stocking feet. Bucky had already been unsteady, and they had to force him to sit long before the soup was finished.

“I thought you said this was like water to him?” Sam asked, brow raised.

Isayev shrugged. “Must be the American blood. We can’t fix _everything_ , you understand.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, grabbing Steve’s wrist and offering his glass. “ _Poprobuj_ , Steve.”

By the time they all settled around the table, with bowls of borscht and plates of blini and rye, they were out of vodka. Natasha said that tea was the thing to drink with dinner anyway.

Isayev said that proper Russian tea had no sugar added, and for sweetness it was meant to be drunk with jam. He chose to demonstrate by coaxing Bucky’s mouth open and placing a spoonful of the jam on his tongue.

“Don’t let the harmless act fool you,” Natasha murmured in Steve’s ear. “Isayev is ruthless. Sleep with one eye open.”

Steve didn’t answer, numbly watching as Isayev guided the teacup in Bucky’s trembling hands up to his lips. _Harmless?_

“ _Za druzhbu myezhdu narodami_!” Isayev said, raising his glass, and the others followed suit.

Natasha was the first to leave. After making her goodbyes, she lingered in the doorway just long enough to tell Isayev that if he called her by any more pet names, whether or not she was around to hear them, she would find out and cut off his tongue.

“That’s my little dove,” Isayev said as soon as she’d shut the door. “I ought to go as well.” He stood, petting Bucky’s hair again. “Darling, I will call you in the morning.”

“You gave him your number, Buck?” Steve asked, as calmly as he could.

“ _Da_ ,” said Bucky.

Isayev insisted on turning the bookcase upright before he went, placing each book back on the shelves. “Next time we try to kill each other, dearest,” he told Bucky somberly, “we must do so without wrecking the house. It’s simply impolite.”

Bucky responded in Russian. Steve’s guess was that he was promising to spill Isayev’s blood outdoors.

Sam was the last the go. He helped Steve guide Bucky into the guest bed and lingered in the hallway once he finally stepped out. There was no pity in his eyes, which helped. Steve wouldn’t have been able to take it.

“If you ever need to talk,” Sam said, “or take a break from the communist party, you can give me a call, all right?”

“I’m losing him again,” Steve muttered, staring down at the vodka bottles he’d placed beside the doorframe.

“Like hell.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Seventy years of torture and brainwashing couldn’t make him stop caring, man. You think you’re gonna lose him just because he was excited to see a familiar face? Come on.”

It should have been a comfort. But three hours later, Steve was wide awake in his bed. Every time he shut his eyes, he could only see the Russian playing with Bucky’s hair.

He heard Bucky moving in the hallway. He assumed his friend was headed toward the bathroom, but instead his own door creaked open and Bucky’s weight settled down on his mattress. “You’re still awake,” Bucky said. “I could hear you thinking from my room.”

“You couldn’t hear me thinking, Buck.”

“Maybe not words,” Bucky said. His freezing metal hand rested on Steve’s shoulder. “But I could still hear it.”

“It’s nothing,” Steve insisted, forcing a smile that felt like a mouthful of splinters. “You should rest.”

Bucky didn’t rest. He started to sing so softly that Steve had to strain his ears to be sure it was Russian. The Cossack lullaby again.

Steve tried to settle himself for Bucky’s sake. There was no sense in making him worry, especially not when there was a former handler out to steal him away. Would it count as stealing? For all Bucky’s talk of snapping Isayev’s neck, he seemed to like the man very much.

“ _Stanu ya toskoi tomit'sya, byesutyeshno zhdat',_ ” Bucky sang. “ _Stanu tselý dyen' molit'sya, po notsham gadat'. Stanu dumat', shto skutshayesh tý f tshuzhom krayu_ —Steve.” He said it so suddenly, so stiffly that Steve couldn’t help but tense, eyes darting to the door and the window in search of assailants.

There was no one there. “Yeah, Bucky?”

“I...” Bucky paused, hesitant. When he spoke again, it was a whisper. “I don’t think Isayev was right.”

“To torture you?”

Bucky gave an impatient little laugh. “That was only maintenance. I mean—I don’t think he was right about you. I think, even if I had been Russia’s—I wouldn’t want to shoot you.”

There was a pause before Steve could remember how to breathe again. “I know, Bucky.”

“I’m a bad Soviet,” Bucky said, his voice small.

“You’re a good man. That’s what counts. It matters more than the _partiinost_ , Buck, I swear.”

For a stretch, Bucky didn’t speak. The silence that fell between them sounded disbelieving.

“Steve?”

“Yes?”

“Did my _mama_ ever sing to me?” His pronunciation was just strange enough to suggest he was using the Russian word.

“I know she sang to your baby sister.” Steve carefully nudged Bucky’s hand aside and sat up. “Here, lie down. I’ll show you.”

And to his surprise, Bucky did. Generally, he wouldn’t lie down in front of anyone without a lot of coaxing. He didn’t enjoy putting himself at any sort of disadvantage, real or perceived. But there wasn’t the slightest struggle now. Maybe it was the drugs and the alcohol.

Steve placed his own hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky went rigid, but didn’t pull away. “ _Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring._ ”

“In this country, even the lullabies are capitalist,” Bucky said. The room was dark, but Steve could feel his smile.

“Want me to stop?” he asked.

“No,” said Bucky. “The melody is nice.”

He was asleep before Steve reached the verse about billy goats. Steve followed maybe a half hour after.

When he woke, faint pink rays of sunlight were filtering through the window. Bucky was still lying on top of the bedspread, his face buried in a pillow.

Down the hall, Steve could just hear his friend’s phone vibrate, but for now, Bucky didn’t stir.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is taken from a lyric of ["I Dreamed a Dream"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86lczf7Bou8) from _Les Miserables_.
> 
> The two songs that Bucky sings are ["Kalinka"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un6zf-6HQd8) (Little Red Berry), a very well-known Russian folk song, and ["Kazach'ya Kolybel'naya Pesnya"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGGQuvrxBZ8) (Cossack Lullaby).
> 
> Blini are thin pancakes that can be filled with either savory (such as caviar) or sweet (such as jam) fillings.
> 
> Translations for the Russian are as follows:
> 
>  _Kalinka, kalinka, kalinka moya!_ : Little red berry, red berry, red berry of mine!  
>  _V sadu yagoda malinka_ : In the garden (there is) a raspberry  
>  _Privet, Steve! Eta Komandir Isayev! My—_ : Hello, Steve! This is Commander Isayev! We—  
>  _Angliyski, dorogoy_ : English, dear.  
>  _Da?_ : Yes?  
>  _My reshíli—_ : We decided—  
>  _Zatem_ : Then  
>  _Parazity_ : Vermin  
>  _Akh, pod sosnoyu, pod zelenoyu, spat' polozhite vy menya_ : Ah, under the pine, the green one, lay me down to sleep.  
>  _Dusha-dyevitsa, polyubi zhe ty myenya_ : Pretty maiden, fall in love with me.  
>  _Shchi da kasha – pishcha nasha_ : Cabbage soup and porridge are all we need to live on (literally "cabbage soup and porridge are our food").  
>  _Sim uznayesh budit vremya branoye zhityo, smyelo vdyenish nogu f stremya i vazmyosh ruzhyo_ : The time will come when you will learn the soldier's way of life; boldly you'll place your foot into the stirrup and take the gun.  
>  _Bayushki bayu_ : Bayushki-bye (an expression to lull a baby to sleep).  
>  _Ya ne ponimayu. Govorite pozhaluysta medlenneye?_ : I don't understand. Could you speak more slowly?  
>  _Gopnik:_ A subculture in Russia known for aggressive behavior and alcohol abuse. Comparable to the US concept of "white trash."  
>  _Poprobuj_ : You try  
>  _Za druzhbu myezhdu narodami!_ : To friendship between nations!  
>  _Stanu ya toskoi tomit'sya, byesutyeshno zhdat'. Stanu tselý dyen' molit'sya, po notsham gadat'. Stanu dumat', shto skutshayesh tý f tshuzhom krayu_ : I will die from yearning, inconsolably waiting. I'll pray the whole day long, and at night I'll wonder, I'll think that you're in trouble far away in a strange land.


End file.
